Congratulations! You’re just been assigned to Staff and are starting to crank away on your new job – new tasks to learn, new people to meet. But, then you start to see a small divide, a difference in the way that you’re instructed to treat your Battalion versus how to treat your Soldiers. Maybe it is when the BN is released early, but your section is routinely instructed to stay until COB to work on a current project. Maybe you get guidance to put the BN first, and you wonder what that means for your Soldiers. Maybe you’re in a group of leaders told to provide early releases for subordinates because of upcmoing JRTC or deployment, but then are corrected later as to why a task isn’t complete.

Have you experienced this pull between serving the unit and leading your Soldiers? How did you balance this contradiction? Was it even a contradiction for you?